newyorkette

This week’s Cheap & Cheerful features the thrifty, delicious midtown lunch of the week for all you Conde Nast interns who need to get out of the building, or all you tekkies or garment district slaves, or showroom/fit models out there. Have a Bi-Bim-Bap for $6.95 at Pergola on 39th street between Broadway and Avenue of the Americas.

Bring your vegetarian or meat BBB to Bryant Park, nab a table or table-chair, open the huge clear plastic bowl of lovely glistening, Korean-style, slightly fermented, crunchy soya, carrots, spinach, mushrooms and asian vegetables. The spectrum of color is a feast in itself, so take a deep breath and gaze at it for a moment before you dig in. It’s all very good for you—the Korean fermentation process makes the vegetables easy to digest. It comes with it’s accompanying miso soup and your choice of white or brown rice.

Pour the little tub of hot sauce over it (half is enough, believe me) and toss it all together. Some people like to add the rice into the veggies before mixing, but I like to eat the veggies first, then have my rice with the soup. If I know I’ll be coming home to a bare cupboard at dinnertime, I’ll save the rice for later and add it to soup or veggies at home. It’s such a copious meal you might actually have leftovers or be able to share with a friend who’s not too peckish.

Pergola is huge, and has a rather cavernous atmosphere, so to find your Bi-Bim-Bap you’ll need to go all the way to the back and hang a left. It’s at the sushi bar, of all places. There are tables upstairs, but you don’t want to eat up there (kind of dark and not very cozy) unless it’s too cold or rainy, so Bryant Park or a peaceful corner of your workplace is your best bet. You could always sit out on Pergola’s “terrace,” but it’s grim, and makes me feel like I’m in the world of Bladerunner during a blackout.

NB: you must go early (show up at 12pm) to get your BBB before they’re all gone. They’re very popular and in limited supply.

Pergola
109 W 39th St, New York 10018
Btwn 6th Ave & Bway
Phone: 212-768-2211
Fax: 212-768-2266

Click here for other reviews.

^{This week’s TNY fiction is available online. (image: carolita johnson)}

The New Yorker seems to have a thread of bizzaro running through it this week, with the incongruous cohabitating with the probable in the Fiction, the Shouts and Murmurs, the Letter from Libya to name a few.

Even the reviews of two books on the role black slaves and their pursuit of freedom played in the Revolutionary War contains facts that Gabriel Garcia Marquez would have admired, such as the self-renamed slave called “British Freedom.” It’s well worth a read if you ever wondered what runaway black slaves were actually doing while Jefferson, Franklin and King George were pontificating (or quibbling) over their right to freedom. Some were garbage-collecting soldiers for the King, while others were trying to start countries of their own. Read it online: Goodbye Columbus, by Jill Lepore.

And now, for something completely different:

From: The Dormitory of D.R.
To: Miss Y [DESTROY AFTER READING]
Your notice of resignation as my current primary affection supplier is hereby accepted. Please return all correspondence over my signature A.S.A.P., plus the photos of me in Superman costume. I enclose a bill for expenses incurred in both the initial romantic-mode campaign and the subsequent romance-enhancement mission, now aborted.
As you know, the ring was a loan and should be returned.
P.S.: “Asshole” is one word.
cc: Miss X.

Read more of “Rummy in love,” by Bruce McCall, here.

TNY’s fiction this week is a little sad and nostalgic, but offers a portrait of immigrants from an unexpected point of view: that of Indian immigrants who remained in America observing that their Indian friends who had returned to India only to return once again to America, seem to have become more American during their sojourn in Bombay. It’s online this week: Once in a lifetime, by Jhumpa Lahiri.

But my favorite read was the black horse of the week. I’d originally looked at it, counted the number of pages, and said: The hell with this. But then I started reading it. Andrew Solomon’s, Circle of Fire, about Libya’s “Leader”, and “The Principal,” otherwise known as Muammar Qaddafi and his son, Seif el-Islam al-Qaddafi, is not online, but I’ll gladly type out a few lines from it to give you a taste.

For example, the gems in this piece include the definition of a common acronym used in Libya as an answer to difficult questions: I.B.M., which stands for Inshallah, bokra, moumken, or “With the will of God, tomorrow, maybe.” I will be using this phrase rather frequently in the future, so get familiar with it.

Solomon’s sugar bowl incident reads like a scene out of Get Smart:

When we had finished our meal, the waiter cleared all our dishes, then came back and redeposited the sugar bowl.
“What’s with the sugar?” I asked the bureaucrat.
He gave me a bleakly mischievous look. “The other one ran out of tape,” he replied.

Libya, seen through Solomon’s eyes, was a trip Through the Looking Glass, with Qaddafi playing the Red Queen, and his prime minister the White Rabbit, administering a country that hasn’t quite decided whether it’s going to be a theocracy, a secular democracy, a third-world country or the next Dubai, or everything all at once.

And a professor beaming over the good news that he’d been given a job in the ministry elicits suprise from Solomon, who wonders why he was “so eager to join a regime that he loathed. ‘Well,’ he replied, ‘it also happens to be the only game in town.’”

Anyone want to buy this children’s T-shirt for their little tyke? Snapped this pic on Broadway at 158th street, on my way to the laundromat.
There were plenty of them. On sale! My favorite detail is the mean look in the dolphin’s eye.

^{Shut yer pie-hole a’ready! (image: carolita johnson)}

There’s a mockingbird singing it’s ass off in a tree near my window tonight. People think mockingbirds are romantic. They imagine that they sing at reasonable times of the day or night. But they’re not romantic. And they tend to start singing at 1am in the morning and not stop until I become unconscious from lack of sleep. And this is what they sound like:

Tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet.... pyu-pyu-pyu!.... tree-tree-treekiyupkiyup-kiyup! .... doowee-doowee-doowee?....

It’s like hearing a bird on speed in the tailspin stages of his nervous breakdown.

To kill a mockingbird… what does it take? Surely it’s been done before, otherwise whence came the title of Harper Lee’s book?

Here are a few fantasies about how I’d kill this mockingbird.

1. I get Maximilan Schell to yell at it like he yelled at Judy Garland in Judgement at Nuremberg. He’d simply scream: DIE! And it would. Die, I mean.
(I’d also pay good money to see him make oysters open themselves that way: OPEN)

2. I persuade Jack Bauer that it is about to detonate the remaining scintox nerve-gas cannisters from atop that ailanthus tree. Bam! Off come it’s kneecaps!

3. My pent-up rage from all those years being called Ape-Face Johnson finally explodes through my eyes as twin laser beams and blows the unsuspecting, happily chattering mockingbird into the sky in a mini, bird-sized mushroom cloud, leaving the tree on fire, with embers like black snowflakes drifting down to the alley below.

4. You kill it for me. (I’ll need it to look like an accident.)

^{A detail from the cover of Frederic Tuten’s “Tintin in the New World.”}

When I lived on East 10th street, I had a downstairs neighbor who I was drawn to because he had white hair and black horn-rimmed glasses just like my friend Michael Crawford. And me, I’m just like my dog, who only liked white fluffy dogs, because her best friend was a white fluffy dog. Very simple souls we are.

One day I bought too much ivy and started trying to give away my surplus. I went downstairs, knocked on my neighbor’s door, offered some ivy, and he accepted. He told me his name, Frederic Tuten, invited me in for a coffee, and within a few minutes it transpired that we had both lived in the same building in Paris: 79 boulevard St-Michel, in a beautiful house that has been reputed to have been Madame de Maintenon’s love-den when she was dating the Sun-King (there’s a sun insignia over the threshold of the front door). Read the rest of this entry »

Remember that rejected wedding dress cartoon that was a variation on one that had been bought? The sold one has been published this week! Here it is, at the cartoonbank (because it’s too hard to point to it on the online version of The New Yorker): [wedding dress jogger].

I’ve always like La Taza de Oro. I go there now and then, as does Harrison Ford, if what I hear is true. A latino greasy-spoon style diner with tables for two and a counter for numerous singles like me, they do a swell café con leche, and when you’re in the mood for a chuleta like your mother made (or like your latin friend’s mother made), it’s here, just as greasy, just as crunchy on the edges, completely unhealthy and wholly carnally satisfying.

The other day I found myself far from home and very hungry, and right in front of La Taza de Oro. I took a seat at the counter, asked what was good and was rained upon by a torrent of enthusiastic suggestions from the men at the counter. Try the chuleta! The roast chicken! You like beef? Carne guisada! Read the rest of this entry »

In France, lily of the valley is the traditional flower of May 1st, and is sold in small sprigs in the streets everywhere.

For an alternative flower, this is one of my friend Xiao Fan’s “Cent fleurs.” To see the other 99 psychadelic and whimsical flowers of varying degrees of volupté and perturbingness, see this link.

This is the flower to make you get out your Carmina Burana and listen to Eugene Jochum’s joyous interpretation of Carl Orff’s “Ecce gratum!”